Software-defined networking (“SDN”) is an architectural framework for creating intelligent networks that are programmable, application aware, and more open. SDN provides an agile and cost-effective communications platform for handling the dramatic increase in data traffic on carrier networks by providing a high degree of scalability, security, and flexibility. SDN can provide several benefits. For example, SDN can allow for the creation of multiple virtual network control planes on hardware that collectively comprise network infrastructure. SDN can help extend service virtualization and software control into many existing network elements. SDN can enable applications to request and manipulate services provided by the network and to allow the network to expose network states back to the applications. SDN can be implemented with user-defined network cloud (“UDNC”) strategic objectives that include exploiting the economic advantages of running network functions on existing hardware platforms of the network by using cloud technology to manage resources elastically based upon business and technical policies. Services can be designed, created, deployed, and managed in near-real time, rather than requiring software development cycles to create or modify services. Enhanced Control, Orchestration, Management, and Policy (“ECOMP”) is a framework that provides service creation and operational management of UDNC. ECOMP enables significant reductions in network resource usage, which in turn can decrease the time and cost required to develop, deploy, operate, and retire products, services, and networks.
User-defined, on-demand cloud services and user digital experience expectations are driving planning and deployment of network functional virtualization and service-centric SDN among global telecommunications service providers. Network Virtualization Platforms (“NVPs”) are deployed in information technology (“IT”) data centers, network central offices, and other network points of presence (“POPs”) to accelerate deployment of on-demand user service and virtualized network functions, which can be managed via ECOMP. An NVP is a shared virtualized infrastructure that supports multiple services and network applications (including real-time and non-real-time applications). Combining SDN and NVP functionality can provide a highly complex and dynamic set of relationships between virtual, logical, and physical resources.
In some situations, network faults can occur within the virtualized and/or non-virtualized portions of network infrastructure. Conventional mechanisms for handling network faults rely on the separation between alarm analytics produced by a team of systems engineers and network ticket analytics produced by a software team, which can be referred to as a RUBY team, that handles aspects of network infrastructure that operate using a static rule-based alarm processing engine using RUBY. Significant challenges can arise during the transition from a purely non-virtualized computing architecture a virtualized and non-virtualized computing architecture. Specifically, an alarm storm can occur within network elements using RUBY with no clear indication as to the cause. This can lead to time-consuming manual data retrieval and delayed analytics by the RUBY team. Moreover, conventional systems fail to provide a mechanism for measuring how well alarm analytics are functioning, much less how well alarm analytics produced by the system engineers perform to support network ticket operations. Therefore, conventional approaches to addressing network faults will not scale up in the highly virtualized, real-time, and dynamic environments of SDN, NVP, and UDNC.